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The Kurt Masur Conducting Seminar: Now It Gets Serious

Ruby Washington/The New York TimesThe Kurt Masur Conducting Seminar, a series of master classes for young conductors at the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory.

The Kurt Masur Conducting Seminar at the Park Avenue Armory is no charm school.

“Success is not what I’m looking for,” Mr. Masur told a young participant at the first session, on Wednesday morning. “I’m looking for the truth: your heart, your brain, your feeling.”

And so, that conductor and her colleagues had better be able to handle the truth. The first to take the podium on Wednesday was all but chased from it after repeated interruptions. “It must be better,” Mr. Masur snapped.

The young woman clearly did better, in his estimation. Still, he said, “your left hand makes you nice.” “Nice” seems as much a term of derision for Mr. Masur as it was for Charles Ives.

By Friday morning Mr. Masur had winnowed the field to the eight who would conduct the Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra in Mendelssohn’s “Italian” and “Reformation” Symphonies at the seminar’s culminating concert on Saturday evening, one movement each. And even with them, he was in a combative mood.

Combative in a righteous cause, to be sure: like Martin Luther, the hero of the “Reformation”; like the prophet Elijah, alluded to in the symphony’s slow movement with a melody lifted from Mendelssohn’s oratorio “Elijah.” Mr. Masur was trying to get the young performers excited about the historic themes in this work, with countermelodies representing the warring parties in a series of bloody conflicts; trying to get them to treat Mendelssohn’s music, which is often seen as dainty and decorous, with dead seriousness, to evoke the conflict in the performance.

Here he crossed swords especially with the amiable young man conducting the symphony’s scherzo. Or rather, raised his sword but drew little response. Mr. Masur had explained on Wednesday that he viewed this movement as a dance occasionally bordering on demonic frenzy: the romp of a repressed populace, “people who are in prison for a lifetime, but once in a while they explode.”

“It’s a little bit too friendly,” he said now, prodding the young man. “Be more devilish. … Can you be angry? … Mendelssohn was so possessed of life in everything that he did. He must be played that way, otherwise everybody thinks, ‘Oh, nice.’”

Anything but that. As for himself, Mr. Masur said, “I like to be a strong enemy or a strong friend.”

That’s the Kurt Masur the New York Philharmonic players knew, and in some cases loved, during his tenure as the orchestra’s music director from 1991 to 2002.

Another of Mr. Masur’s injunctions to the orchestra on Friday leaped out in relation to that era: “Start every pianissmo pianissimo, every piano piano. This is all the same mezzo forte sound.”

Those might well have been his first words to the Philharmonic. That, at any rate, was one of the most important changes he wrought almost from the moment he took over. Too bad it hasn’t stuck.

I sorely miss Masur’s pianissimi. The opening of Bruckner’s 4th Symphony that he played back in the 90s with the NYPhil is still in my mind and heart. May the glorious sound of the NYPhil under his baton come back one day.